Cities that shelled out big bucks to learn Richard Florida's prescription for vibrant urbanism are now hearing they may be beyond help.

Previously (in 2008):

Atlanta is just as hosed as Munich, but Richard Florida has a new book.

MacGillis:

In 2008 came Who's Your City, essentially a how-to book for choosing a place to live. Florida is candid about his business plan -- when he plugged his second book on The Charlie Rose Show, the host asked, "Don't you think we've milked this for about as much as we can, Richard?"

"I hope not, Charlie," Florida said. "I hope not."

DeLaval:

The Voluntary Milking System (VMS) allows cows to decide when to be milked, and gives dairy farmers a more independent lifestyle, free from regular milkings.

A banker:

Revolutionize your heart out. We'll still have this country by the balls.

If the gathering, storage, and processing of information puts us all in the center of a digital panopticon, the failure to forget creates a panopticon crossbred with a time-travel machine. Don't forget about forgetting.

David Lynch:

So many things these days are made to look at later. Why not just have the experience and remember it?

Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so? We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it. Why is it so beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage?

Mark Twain:

When an entirely new and untried political project is sprung upon the people, they are startled, anxious, timid, and for a time they are mute, reserved, noncommittal. The great majority of them are not studying the new doctrine and making up their minds about it, they are waiting to see which is going to be the popular side.

Noteworthy:

Do you understand the difference between "Is it worth buying?" and "Can it be sold?"

Decius:

It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.

This is the road to despotism. This is the fevered dream of theocracy. This is America.

Jules Dupuit:

It hits the poor, not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich ... Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.

David Foster Wallace:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

It's not a matter of waiting for two or three years to absorb the overproduction. It's a matter of drastically reducing real estate prices to well below replacement cost. And when you sell something for below replacement cost -- that might sound like, well, "Somebody takes a hit but life goes on as usual." No, life doesn't go on. For the owners of that retail or housing space, every dollar that they invest will be money they don't get back. That is another definition of a slum. There's no incentive to invest in a slum. So here you are.

Facebook holds out a utopian possibility: What once was lost will now be found. But the heaven of the past is a promised land destroyed in the reaching. Facebook, here, becomes the anti-madeleine, an eraser of memory.

Mementos, snapshots, reunions, and now this -- all of them modes of amnesia, foes of true remembering. The past should stay in the heart, where it belongs.

David Clark:

If the gathering, storage, and processing of information puts us all in the center of a digital panopticon, the failure to forget creates a panopticon crossbred with a time-travel machine. Don't forget about forgetting.

Thom Andersen:

Perhaps "Blade Runner" expresses a nostalgia for a dystopian vision of the future that has become outdated. This vision offered some consolation, because it was at least sublime. Now the future looks brighter, hotter and blander. Computers will get faster, and we will get slower. There will be plenty of progress, but few of us will be any better off or happier for it.